Internet protocol (IP) routing was originally designed for host-to-host communication. Today, however, most Internet traffic is used for content dissemination. As the demand for content, such as streaming video, increases, using the existing Internet infrastructure becomes more challenging, especially with respect to time-sensitive and bandwidth intensive traffic such as streaming audio and video media content.
In an Internet content delivery network, the ingested media content may have different file formats targeted toward different audio codecs and video codecs and different types of media clients such as computers, televisions and mobile handsets. These different types of media clients generally have different requirements with respect to media file formats, codecs, bitrates and so on. For example, a high-definition television system requires higher picture resolution than a cellphone and requires larger media files and higher bitrates. Generally, when different copies of the content are needed for different delivery schemes, multiple copies of the content are saved at the origin server and cached at the edge server of the content delivery system.
The presence of multiple media files, however, results in higher network traffic and lower system performance. For example, in the presence of multiple media files, a cache of a given size will be able to store less video resulting in a higher cache miss rate. From the user's perspective, this can result in periodic interruptions in the streaming media.
What is needed are systems and methods of improving streaming video content delivery.